Friday, April 9, 2010

Now that the snow has melted & the temperatures are staying above 40 F, the aroma of grilling can be caught in the air every evening through all the neighborhoods of Minneapolis. We are unable to resist its temptation & are happy to be headed back to our backyard grill. So, we pulled the last of the chicken from our freezer (no, more chicken from the local farm until June!) & Matt decided he wanted to try grilling it under bricks.Spatchcocking is our favorite way to prepare a chicken for roasting & this just takes that one step further by pressing the bird even flatter with bricks. The results are really pretty fabulous. You end up with a juicy bird that has been very evenly cooked. & the skin is to die for. We couldn't stop ourselves from nibbling on the wings & drumettes even before dinner hit the plate. We'll definitely be making chicken this way again throughout grilling season.

Here's how Matt made his Bricken Chicken (he came up with the name).Follow our instructions for spatchcocking a chicken. Season your chicken anyway you like. We used some minced garlic & a blend of Italian herbs. Then rub the whole thing with some olive oil.Wrap two bricks with foil. Use bricks that are solid so they are heavy. Heat the grill to medium/medium-low.Oil the grill grates & place the chicken on skin side down.Place the bricks on top of the chicken to press it as flat as possible.When the skin side is golden brown & starting to get crispy remove the bricks & flip the chicken over. For us that took 23 minutes. We chose not to put the bricks back on the chicken because we didn't want to ruin that beautiful skin, I know some people do put the bricks back on at this point. Then just cook until the chicken is cooked through & the juices run clear. We had a pretty small chicken, about 3 lbs, so we only needed 15 minutes more.Remove the chicken from the grill & let rest about 5 minutes before carving. It's hard to resist that little beauty!

23 comments:

I am showing this to my husband! I've seen spatchcocked chicken before and have always wanted to try it (as if I don't say THAT a lot!) Rather than seasoning the chicken, is there any reason why I couldn't marinate the whole bird - let's say in your chai brine?

The Roman comment was meant to be flippant. The important part was that we tried a technique, ended up with a juicy chicken with a crispy skin & wrote about about OUR experience. Googling" Grilling Chicken Under a Brick" will bring up many other recipes for this method that also claim great results, recipes from places like Bon Appetit, Fine Cooking & many other blogs so its not like this is unheard of.

Anyway I'm not going to change your mind &, unless I have a bad result, you aren't going to change mine so we might as well agree to disagree.